You’re in the public eye after a long hiatus, and people love a spectacle. Sales-wise, things have already taken a turn for the better. I check your Amazon page to see six of your novels in the top twenty, and another has made the top five. No wonder Tim was so adamant about you writing Hannah’s story. A cold case exposé couldn’t come at a more opportune time.
Neither could The Perfect Suspect, which brings me to future planning.
My racing mind needs something with which to busy itself, and I have to finish this book for reasons I can’t quite explain. It’s the one thing holding me together right now, and although it’s based in fact, it is fiction and up to me to determine the outcome. Maybe that’s the allure of writing it when everything in me insists I head for the border, Canada or Mexico, running until, like Hannah, I can hide in plain sight.
Unlike her, I don’t have the luxury of natural physical transformation. I’m already mature.
I lean back against the headboard, glancing between the bathroom disaster and the drawn curtains, and force everything out of my mind except my characters, real-life-inspired people decidedly better off than we are.
People free of Vern.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
I WORK TO THE POINT of exhaustion, wrapping this draft in a blur of either passionately articulate or completely delusional writing, and while sleep doesn’t come easily, it comes eventually and ends with a regressive nightmare I wish would one day stop.
I startle awake to the slurping sound of wet skin on skin, Matthew standing naked at our bedside, stroking himself. The therapist chalked the incident up to an unusual-but-not-undocumented side effect of the SSRIs, claiming sleepwalking—masturbating—was no more worrisome than nightmares.
I say it wasn’t his bed Matthew was standing over.
Is there such a thing as posttraumatic parenting?
The effects are as real as they are long-lasting, and I force myself out of bed, having relived this particular trauma more times than I’d care to already. I stretch and imagine the knife I never planned on using in the nightstand drawer. I’d tell you it was for peace of mind, but you wouldn’t believe that after what I have done.
I’ve hidden so much, and for what? For a sham marriage to a washed-up author whose best days are behind him? You were never worth this, Bert. Not even in your prime.
I reach up and feel my short hair, adding “sudden change in appearance before a potential bail hearing” to the growing list of reasons I should run. Instinct drives me in that direction, supported by common sense which has weighed my transgressions and found me guilty.
Harper Stone, jury of one.
Potential fugitive.
Claire can’t have been the only one who knew how to hide someone, but I wish she were here or that I’d been the kind of writer you are. One who meets with criminals and serial killers, because then I’d be acquainted with the sort of resourceful folks who deal in fluid identities. I’d make a call and be gone before Vern had a chance to look beyond his own shortsightedness.
As it stands, I’m alone, unable to financially support myself, and a murderer—something I can’t admit to anyone else, though I don’t have to. Not yet. If Vern never discovers the truth, I wonder if I could push forward with you behind bars as though nothing had happened.
But something has.
I’m reminded of this as a commotion grows in the parking lot below.
Sound carries in a building with walls this thin, and I realize quickly the oversight has been caught. The police are here for the car. For me, and I’m not ready yet, if one can ever be truly prepared for something like their arrest. I won’t turn myself in for practical reasons, first and foremost being because I haven’t secured legal representation and you can’t be trusted to do so on my behalf, not when I have left you stranded.
I creep to the window and peel back the curtain only far enough to see the same cruisers and Crime Scene Investigation vans as were at our house yesterday cramming into an overfull lot. The motel doesn’t have a big draw, but there are enough people here with the racetrack season—two summer months, during which Saratoga Raceway becomes a haven for ridiculous hat-wearing women and degenerate gamblers—where even the worst locations have no vacancy. Police surround my car, one holding what appears to be a spare key undoubtedly retrieved during the search of our home or sometime shortly thereafter. I want to watch what happens next, to see the look on their faces when they discover what is in the glove compartment. The critical piece of evidence I had been holding onto in case. Not the murder weapon. That’s been grinded on with a bench grinder, bleached, burnt, and tossed into the Hudson. What I have is for my defense, because yes, my actions are narrowly defensible.
A uniformed officer enters the rental office, undoubtedly to inquire about which room I might be in, though I used an alias. The clerk will surely remember me as the one person who insisted on paying cash, and when he tells them my room number, the police will intercept me because, while I wasn’t in disguise until after check-in, the change isn’t drastic enough to hide me now. As usual, I didn’t think this through. All I did was cut and color my hair.
I suck at this.
I want to crawl beneath the bed, but this isn’t hide-and-seek. This is life or death, and no matter how badly I want this to go away, I simply can’t stay here. I pack my few belongings, calmly but quickly exiting the second-floor room. At least a half dozen people lean over the balcony, tourists getting more than a look at the horse races this vacation. I imagine them telling their friends back home, wherever that may be, about the full-scale sweep for the homicidal maniac that may have been sleeping right next door.
I wonder if they’ll ever know it was only me, a former bestselling author’s wife, who killed her stepson more or less in self-defense.
The truth is always less interesting.
I creep down the back stairs and into the adjacent parking lot of a restaurant that won’t open for hours. Common sense dictates I don’t draw attention to myself, but I run. To where, I don’t know, but anywhere other than here, where the one thing that incriminates, my car, also contains the one thing that proves what really happened that night: the unregistered gun, covered in Matthew’s fingerprints, locked in my glove compartment.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
I’M A WOMAN ON THE run. Scratch that, the least qualified woman on the run. Someone with no clue how to evade the police long-term or live off the land or whatever the hell it is that fugitives do. I’m an upper-middle-class housewife, married to a man currently residing behind bars. The next thing I’ll be is a woman in prison, and I doubt it’s as charming as Orange is the New Black makes it look.
I should have prepared.
I can’t believe I have been so stupid as to think this wouldn’t catch up with me—with us—or that when it did, I’d have any clue how to behave. The nagging thought lingers that I should call Deon, but if the police are as close as I expect to discovering the truth, there isn’t a worse idea.
I have to stop needing men.
I can get myself out of this.
Pep talks normally help, but right now all I can focus on are the nagging aches in my legs and side reminding me that running is exhausting. I can’t walk much farther, and my car is on a flatbed, which means if I’m going to remain even temporarily free, I have to be smart. I have to start thinking like a criminal, and this is bigger than the credit cards I need to but can’t use. This is a matter of disappearing without a trace, starting with my cell phone, which tracks me from tower to tower, triangulating my location, even now, while the police search for the woman who fled the motel.
That woman is not me.
I erased her with a bottle of dye, a pair of scissors, and some cheap clothing because I will not stand out.
Yet, I do. I’m disheveled on the roadside, staring across at a gas station with a plastic bag in one hand and a laptop in the other. Maybe it’s the paranoia again, but I might notice me if I were anyone else.
I could call a cab, but doing so adds another person to the mix, someone else who might identify me, which leaves public transportation as my only option.
I dart across the road to a bus shelter, reluctantly deciding to relieve myself of the phone that has been a liability from the beginning. A swarm of flies rises from a nearly overflowing trash can, and I feel physical pain as I initiate the factory reset. I have committed almost none of the numbers to memory and am now incommunicado, which sounds far more intriguing a thing to be than it actually is. I’m isolated in every sense of the word, and God, why is this so hard? I eject and dump the SIM card, tucking my phone gently beneath the garbage. Deserting this inanimate thing saddens me, like abandoning a child.
Cell phone addiction is apparently a thing.
A bus approaches and grinds to a halt. I board with enough regrets to fill a fleet of buses. I fucked up. I can admit it now that my car is headed to the impound lot for the forensic inspection that will be the beginning of my undoing.
A smarter person would have detailed the trunk, would have torched the damn car and reported it stolen. Anything except drive it around with blood in the carpet and a gun in the glove compartment. To be fair, I did use a tarp, only tarps fold, crease, and if you’re not careful, they leak. The black carpet looked perfectly clean to the naked eye. Now, I wonder.
Reading about a thing and doing it are vastly different experiences. I’m no more suited to be a killer than I am to pilot an airplane.
I take a seat, and the man across the aisle pulls his phone from his pocket while looking directly at me. His attention makes me uneasy and eager to disembark. I imagine him sitting with a sketch artist, telling the police he is sure it was me he saw. I lower my head so my hair falls in front of my face and ride through several stops until I’m in familiar territory—dreading my next move. Only when I stand to leave do I see another serious miscalculation on my part. Nothing goes without being recorded these days, and I don’t know why I didn’t notice this sooner. Ahead of the driver, in plain view, is a wide-angle camera focused on the passengers.
I’m being recorded, catalogued, and soon to be collected just as the items from our home had been.
I get off the bus and consider my location: the center of suburbia, feet away from a shopping center and another bus stop. If the police realize I’m here, will they guess where I’m headed? Vern might, given the questions he’s already posed, but the reality is, I could be anywhere. I could have transferred buses here, or stopped to buy a burner cell—which I probably should do. I could be shopping for a disguise or hiding in the crowd. Maybe, though, I have met up with someone here now aiding and abetting an alleged murderer. I hate to put Deon in that position, but if these are my last hours, I can’t think of a better person to spend them with.
CHAPTER SIXTY
TWO MILES LATER MY head becomes clear and I realize this isn’t the last anything, other than maybe a last day of freedom. Even if I’m arrested, tried, and convicted, New York State hasn’t had the death penalty since 2004. The worst I’m looking at is life behind bars, which doesn’t sound half bad in this moment: a cot, air-conditioning, and no pressure to write or support myself.
My legs have become rubber. My neck aches from looking over my shoulder for anyone who might be searching for me, though perhaps no one is, at least not actively. I’m not a threat at-large. I’m an incompetent criminal who is bound to turn up.
By the time I reach Deon’s house, I’m exasperated from too long in the sun, probable dehydration, and from the fat, weeping blisters on my heels after wearing the new sneakers I never broke in but foolishly took with me. Just as with the winter pajamas, their proximity to the door led me to them instead of to something more comfortable.
I stumble up Deon’s porch steps and ring the bell. I’m exhausted, not only from undoubted heatstroke, but from this case. From you and Matthew. From life and death circling us like a drain.
“Harper, Jesus!” Deon whisks me inside. “I’ve been trying to call you. Where have you been?”
Incommunicado.
Deon’s been calling the now reformatted and probably stolen cell I should have had the common sense to deactivate, especially since I went to the trouble to buy a laptop. It would be a two-second fix, but would tip off the police to the exact time I attempted to disappear. I tell myself that’s why I didn’t perform even a temporary shutoff, but for a woman who studies criminal behavior, I’m inept. A failure. Someone quickly losing ground and about to ruin the one truly good person in my life.
Tears gather and fall in an embarrassing sign of weakness. I shudder as the air-conditioning hits my burnt skin, the guilt of my wrongdoing weighing more heavily in the presence of someone who views me as one who can do no wrong. A confession swells inside of me, but I can barely catch a breath. Deon’s a sucker for crying, and though I need sympathy right now, more than anything I need to finally tell someone the truth. To be judged less harshly for what I’ve done than I am judging myself.
Deon checks me over for injuries, but the most damaged parts of me aren’t visible from the outside. “What happened?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” The words stick, each having to be forced out by thinking them several times before speaking. I have no idea what’s gone on since I’ve left the motel or what might lead back to me. All I know is that I have to take a beat. Recuperate. Bask in Deon’s tender concern. I hadn’t realized until this moment how deep my vulnerability runs or how badly I need him.
“I mean to your hair.” Deon’s mouth tightens into a grin, and we erupt into what feels like wholly inappropriate laughter.
“Hormones?” I welcome the moment of levity and the relief which comes from the knowledge that though Deon probably has some news, he doesn’t have all of it yet. He doesn’t seem to know about the car, about the gun being found, or about my fleeing the scene of a search. Though I will eventually have to tell him everything, right now all I want is to remain an innocent victim—the tragic wife—at least for a while longer.
Vern has kept Deon in the dark for good reason, and in this moment, I am appreciative of that fact.
Deon helps me into an upholstered armchair and hands me a bottle of water. Sitting down feels like a luxury, and I lean my head back, attempting, in small, slow sips, to rehydrate. Deon sits on the ottoman, taking my feet into his lap and untying my sneakers. He loosens the laces, but my feet have swollen to the point that the shoes no longer fit, if they ever did. My skin has shriveled, and blood covers my heels from where my socks have bunched under my feet.
Deon examines the torn skin, twisting my foot this way and that for a closer look.
Truth be told, I’m not sure I could have gotten this far on my own. The socks would have had to come off sooner or later, but the blood has clotted, and the fresh scabs tear loose no matter how gentle Deon tries to be. The pain is excruciating. I sip the water I wish was vodka or gin. Sometimes, a woman needs to feel numb.
I have never meant that as literally as I do right now.
Deon fills a plastic basin with enough cold water to cover my feet up to the ankles then guides them in one at a time. All I can think is that I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve him, and I want to cry but am afraid if I start up again I might never stop.
“Where have you been,” he asks as he rinses the dirt and heat and blood from my skin.
“A motel,” I say. Short and sweet.
“You should have come here. After what’s happened with Bert, I tried to warn you. I didn’t want you to see that.”
That. You, hauled off in the back of a squad car. Our belongings entered into evidence, including maybe the box Marjorie entrusted to us. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but the possibility exists that despite my efforts, Hannah’s identity has either been exposed or is about to be. If I hadn’t watched the whole thing unfold, I might never have believed this is the beginning of the end of us.
“It’s okay,” I say because none of this is Deon�
�s fault.
“It’s not,” he says. “I should’ve caught him. Matthew should’ve never made it to your house that night.”
I hate that Deon is beating himself up over losing Matthew in the woods, and I’m sick that, with all of the evidence more or less pointing in my direction, I still can’t bring myself to let him think badly of me. I’m too desperate for love, for pity. To be the wronged party in anyone’s opinion but my own. I want to tell him that even if Matthew hadn’t been to our house that night, he’d have been there eventually. Maybe the outcome would have been different, and Matthew would be behind bars instead. Maybe I’ve done us all a favor by eliminating an eventual threat. I want to say these things, but they won’t matter. Deon’s guilt over his perceived role in Matthew’s death has apparently been eating him more than me being a murderer, which says something about me that I’d rather not admit.
“Have you told Vern?” I ask, meaning has he admitted to seeing Matthew the night of the murder.
Deon nods. “He’d have found out eventually.”
I agree, and Deon’s testimony about the stolen gun is critical to my defense. Better the truth is volunteered than uncovered during the investigation, rendering Deon an untrustworthy witness. “Does he know about us?” Also critical to my defense is a lack of bias. If our affair is even hinted at, Deon will be useless to my case.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
This is not absolute. Either of us may have been followed these past weeks, our phones watched and our numbers cross-referenced. I want to ask him not to tell—to compel his protection of me one last time—but I can’t bring myself to. What Deon does and doesn’t share is up to him. He has to decide how far on the line he’s willing to put his career in favor of a love I can never properly reciprocate.
“That’s good,” I say because at least if Vern asks, I’ll know Deon hasn’t confessed. “Better he doesn’t know for sure, that he keeps us separate.”
Where We Went Wrong Page 21